This is a short post about mnemonic songs. I read this cool song avout periodic table and decided to write a post. The main question: when do we generate mnemonic songs?
During the course we put a special emphasis on visualization and visual markers. The reason is very simple: the main emphasis of the course is on the speed. We teach SPEED reading and FAST memorization. In fact, this is not the only possible emphasis. When we need to memorize terminology or foreign language, we use dual coding instead.
Dual coding is a significantly slower method, but the lack of short-term speed is balanced by long-term efficiency. When we talk about long term memory, the strength of memorization is roughly proportional to the effort you put into creating the memorization. The effort of memorization is one of the triggers that guides the memory rewrite when we sleep and reduce the amount of times we need to repeat what we learnt. Generating a highly memorable song surely requires a lot of effort. You can use this site for some ideas generating mnemonic. Now once you generated the mnemonic, you try not only to learn its words, but also generate visualization of it as a funny animation – this is the visual coding you know. The audio and visual information has different points of failure and thus strengthen each other immensely.
You do need to repeat the mnemonics several times during the day, or even use Anki – repetition is an additional trigger for the memory to be stored in long-term memory. You should also try to connect the song with your existing knowledge: the existing knowledge sthrengthens the new knowledge and improves long-term memorization. Finally it helps to create a couple of “anchor markers” – very memorable visualizations for the beginning and the end of the song, otherwise you may have trouble retrieving it from the long-term memory.
The short-term memory is recorded into the long-term memory when we sleep. If you want to improve the process, you need to have a good night sleep. Try repeating your mnemonics before you go to sleep to get a better effect.
